Smartphone on loan: Another manipulative offer by Safaricom

Safaricom’s brainchild M-shwari will now offer subscribers smartphones and tablets on loan in partnership with gadget manufacturers Huawei, Tecno, LG and Samsung.

The move is in a quest to grow high speed data devices connected to its network. As much as this may seem to be in the interest of the subscriber, Safaricom is making a fortune out of the project that is only eligible to Safaricom and Mshwari customers who will be required to deposit 30 per cent of the device purchase price to their M-Shwari savings account prior to being advanced the loan and pay the balance within six months.

How urgent a device would be to acquire a gadget loan is exactly what I cannot get my head around considering six months would be enough time to save up for the gadget of preference freeing oneself from 15.6 per cent facility fee.

Defaulters will be charged sh200 for every overdue installment on top of which Safaricom will discontinue a defaulter from calling or sending SMSes, using data services and obtaining Okoa jahazi airtime which will ultimately have your device disabled. Well, do the maths how worth is the gadget loan?

In any case this goes well with Safaricom’s resolution of cutting dependence on voice revenue to increase data consumption with its recent launch of 4G network and this is a perfect way to activate the vision. As of March 2014, voice accounted for 60 per cent of the telecommunications company revenue. Mobile data revenue recorded a 30% increase from 2013’s ksh6.6 billion worth of revenue.

The mobile data revenue increase is thanks to the telecom’s effort of breaking gadget price barriers that had shut out a tangible population who could not afford the devices. Today, smartphone devices used on Safaricom network have grown to over 3 million since subscribers are now using internet on the go using their mobile devices. The increment also owes to the fact that data has been made cheaper and easily accessible to the market with an introduction of ‘Okoa bundles’ a service that lends users bundles which they later pay in form of airtime.

Different services outwardly manipulative by the telecommunications company are not for the subscriber to benefit from even with beneficial result, it is short term. Okoa Jahazi, Okoa Bundles, Mshwari loans and many other Okoa services cost the subscriber more and this is where individuals ought to be smart in their choices enjoying the services. know your better option.

Winfred Kuria is a self-constituted web content writer in charge of Tech News and Events Publicity at Kachwanya.com. She will communicate in the simplest way possible with an aim of changing the world one mind at a time.